Bill Would Set Cops’ Ticket Quota at Zero
Rep. David Stevens of AZ wants to bar police departments from establishing quotas for traffic tickets or basing promotions or assignments on the number of tickets an officer issues.
A bill advancing through the Arizona state Legislature would prohibit law enforcement agencies from establishing quotas for traffic citations or determining officers’ ranks or assignments based on the number of tickets issued.
According to the Tucson Sentinel, that would be fine with Levi Bolton, executive director of the Arizona Police Association, an umbrella organization of groups representing law enforcement and correctional officers. He said one of the biggest problems with quotas is that they bring the fairness of law enforcement into question when a warning could suffice.
“Those are the kinds of things that bring about trust and fairness … that make people want to report crimes to police, to talk about sensitive things with police officers,” Bolton told the Senate Public Safety, Military and Technology Committee, which unanimously endorsed HB 2410 on Feb. 25.
But John Thomas, a lobbyist for the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, told the committee that no law enforcement agency in the state currently has quotas. He said that the bill was drafted after a Tucson jurisdiction established a quota of one traffic citation a day, a policy that has since been eliminated.
“What you’re trying to do with the bill is you’re trying to take the administration of officers and put it into state law, when it’s something that’s left up to, at this stage, the local jurisdictions,” he said.
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